We Had It So Good (29 page)

“Just a little. I remember a few things.”

They drove east from Warsaw. A river ran through the landscape and on either side there were fields of wheat. The crops undulated in the summer breezes, the landscape looked as if it would not harm a fly.

His father sat chewing a wad of gum which he had bought with him from Los Angeles. Over here, he had heard, everyone was crazy about American chewing gum, it was practically a currency and could be used to get you out of trouble.

“Yeah,” said Stephen, “if you were a GI in 1945.”

His father occasionally turned his head to look at some unmemorable feature of the passing road.

“Do you recognize anything, Dad?”

“Yes, the same place. Very boring, isn't it? It reminds me of the prairies, where I was only once and once was enough.”

“Andrea and the kids weren't impressed with the Midwest either. What did your father do exactly?”

“He worked for a miller, he was a farmhand, mainly in charge of the horses.”

“That doesn't sound like a very Jewish profession.”

“He didn't have a profession, no one had a profession. He had a job, like I did.
You
have a profession.” Stephen had not yet told his father he had taken redundancy and early retirement. Andrea had forced him into it, it was either that or go into therapy for his depression. Ivan, who had accepted a huge redundancy settlement to go away and do nothing for the rest of his life, came around one evening and said, “Stephen, you know what you are? You're a form of obsolete technology like eight-track or the cassette tape. Accept it.” Now the two retired men sat all day in the conservatory drinking coffee and planning businesses they might set up, all of them foolish.

“Did you like horses when you were growing up? Did you get to ride them?”

“Ride the horses? Are you nuts? These were horses to pull carts, horses with hair round their ankles, I mean their hooves. No one rode them.”

They drove in silence for another forty minutes. Stephen thought if he had to look at another stalk of wheat he would hallucinate with the monotony. Eventually they arrived at an uninspiring town, clean and orderly, with a marketplace in the center selling electrical goods and cheap shoes.

“My God, is this it?” Stephen said. “This is where you were born?”

“Just over there,” said his father, pointing with his finger.

“Where?”

“You see the pizza parlor? Our house was around the corner.”

“Do you want to go there first or to the hotel?”

“To the hotel.”

“You must be knocked out.”

“No, I slept the whole way over. I took two glasses of vodka and when I woke up we were over France. LOT is an excellent airline, they took very good care of me. I'm fresh as a button but I want to see what kind of hotel they have here.”

It was nothing much. Most of the guests had business with the brewery or the company that made wooden doors. “Don't buy anything from the market,” the receptionist told them when she gave them their keys. “The vendors come from Belarus and they are dishonest. Anyway, you can buy much better things in Vilnius.”

“Not bad,” Stephen's father said when they had opened the doors of their adjoining rooms. “It doesn't need to put up the president of the United States or Julia Roberts.”

“Julia Roberts?”

“She's a big star.”

“I know. So why would she come here?”

“No, she wouldn't need to. This is what I'm saying.”

They went out straight after inspecting their rooms. There was
nothing to stay in them for. In the square a troupe of Latvian folk dancers had arrived in their bus. The men wore mustard-colored pantaloons tucked into soft leather boots, white shirts and red bows tied round their necks, while the women were in skirts of rainbow stripes and embroidered waistcoats.

“What the hell is this?” said Stephen.

“The peasants, they always like to dance.”

“Weren't your family peasants?”

“No! What are you talking about, of course we weren't peasants.”

“But you said your father looked after horses.”

“That's nothing to do with it. A peasant is a completely different thing.”

“Okay.”

They walked along the street under mild, milky innocent skies past a small supermarket and various shops selling goods marked in euros; they might as well have been in rural France, Stephen thought. Or Ireland. His father turned into a street of old houses. “This was where the Jews lived,” Si said. The houses were more substantial than Stephen had been expecting, he had imagined some kind of hut.

The apricot-colored house lay behind a ramshackle wooden fence painted green. Steps and a green front door and a small enclosed porch with a pointed wooden roof. It had an air of poverty and dereliction. In London properties like this would be worth a fortune, in the Polish town everyone had built themselves white stuccoed chalets with steep red roofs and a carport.

Stephen watched his father staring at the house. He waited for him to speak. He did not expect him to cry.

“Which was your bedroom?” he finally asked.

“You think I had my own bedroom? I shared with my two cousins!”

“I didn't know that.”

“A lot of people lived in this house, not just us. The whole
mishpachah
lived here.”

“Who?”

“Relations. Uncles, aunts, my grandfather.”

“What was he like?”

“Very religious and smelled of fish.”

“Did you get on with your neighbors, I mean the Polish ones?”

“Yes, we got on fine. No problems. Okay, sometimes there were problems, they were good Catholic boys and they said we killed their Jesus. They should have been grateful to us. If we hadn't killed him, then he couldn't have died for their sins and they would all go straight to hell.”

“That's very true.”

His father nodded. “Stupid people.”

“Do you want to go inside?” asked Stephen. “Should we knock?”

“No. What for? I'm not going to find my mother in there.”

“Okay. What do you want to do now?”

“We'll just walk around.”

Stephen was waiting for his father to unburden himself of a past he had been silent about for nearly eighty years. He expected to learn about the mother, the father, the sister; he expected to have to face up to the horror of what had happened to them. He had already looked this up on the internet: Treblinka, or a mass grave in the forest. But his father walked slowly along the pavements, remarking on how the town had spread out from its old square, stretching away into suburbs over what had once been farmland.

“What I always thought,” he finally said, “a nothing place.”

“Do you feel any attachments? Do any memories return to you?”

His father shook his head. “I had a mother and a father. I had a sister. You know who took them from me? Not the Poles, it was those immigration men at Ellis Island. They're the bastards. If it wasn't for them we would have all made it to America. The Poles always do what you expect of them, you should always fear the worst, but of the Americans we had high hopes. We believed in justice and freedom, all they gave us was a cross in chalk on our
backs. They were the ones who crucified my mother and father and my sister.”

Stephen had never heard his father say a word against America. He had always assumed he was a patriot, a supporter of all of America's wars and a Republican voter because that's how his San Diego in-laws voted.

“And you have sustained this anger all these years?”

“What anger? Who said I was angry?”

“You sounded angry.”

His father shrugged. “I lived my life among movie stars and their minks, what's to be angry with America about?”

Stephen saw him drooping with fatigue. “Let's go back to the hotel and rest,” he said.

“Okay.”

His father did not get up for dinner. When Stephen rang his room, he answered in a blurred voice. “I'm okay, but I want to sleep.”

Stephen ate alone in the dining room. He had never felt so depressed in his life, as if his own father had abandoned him to this alien world of Poles, whose language he did not know, and all of them, to him, had the eyes of the descendants of murderers, which was unfair. They were all in it together now, members of the European Union. After dinner he watched Sky News on television, amazed to find a TV channel he understood. Hey, he thought. London is going to host the Olympics.

The following morning, his father rose early and had already finished breakfast when Stephen got down to the dining room.

“Today,” he said, “I'll show you the mills where they made the flour and then we'll go to Warsaw. All my life my father told me it was the finest city in the world, and I never saw it. Warsaw! Now
this
is going to be something.”

W
arsaw, which Stephen's father insisted on pronouncing Vashar, was a flat disappointment and his father did not want to stay a third night. “I don't know what I expected,” he told his son, “but this is a big nothing. You might as well be in Culver City.”

But it was difficult to leave and get home.

London seemed marked and different to Stephen in the taxi coming from the airport. For the first time, he felt a sickening sense of imminent danger, that the nut jobs inside his computer had jumped right out of it, at first in monochrome, pale and printy, then wavering for a moment until they became flesh-and-blood young men with backpacks, walking purposefully into the underground stations. His father was seeing something different, brick houses for the first time and roads built long ago to bear horses and carriages, double-decker red buses, which he cried out at the sight of, “Do they ever fall over with the people inside them?” And Stephen said, “Listen, there were bombs two days ago, underground. Do you understand?” His father nodded.

“Terrorists. Like the ones who hit New York. Not them, of course, they're all dead, but the brains behind the operation.”

“It's not a spy movie, Dad.”

They pulled up at the house. Stephen ran up the steps, Andrea
opened the door. Si said, “
This
is what I thought I would see in Vashar.”

“Everyone is okay, everyone is accounted for,” Andrea said. “I was with a client, Max and Cheryl were still having breakfast, and Marianne says she was asleep. Ivan and Simone were at home, and no one else we know was anywhere near it.”

Si had not seen his daughter-in-law for several years. She was no longer the girl with the radiant expression in the rabbit fur jacket, sitting by the window, and her once red hair was blond. He didn't know why women did this, but they all did, in his experience. All the dark-haired girls of his youth were now light-headed, even the Cuban sisters-in-law. Women had a great deal to lose from age. Some of them wrinkled and some of them sagged, and his daughter-in-law was the kind who sagged, dewlaps hung from her jaw. Unlike the movie stars she had not had anything done to her face, she didn't have the frozen rabbit look he associated with the motion pictures. Still, he thought, she was never a beautiful girl or even a very pretty one, but she was a nice woman then and she was a nice woman now. A sympathetic face. His son had chosen well. And one thing that was different about her was that she had a lovely smile. That he saw at once. She had finally fixed her teeth.

She took his hand and led him up the stairs to his room. It was a long time since anyone had touched him, Mrs. McLean had hoped to hold his hand when he wept at
Schindler's List,
but he hadn't wept. Andrea's hand was soft with a scented cream. Passing the bathroom he saw an old lady sitting on a low chest in the hall wearing a green robe. Maybe it's a hallucination, he thought. They used to have old people living here, I guess it's her ghost. The idea did not perturb him. Between the two worlds there were occasionally passages, wormholes that you could slip in and out of and speak to the dead. He had never found his mother and father or his sister, Gittel, but his wife came and went, usually on Sunday afternoons when he sat with a magazine on his lap in the empty
house, thinking of the times when they used to go to the beach, and he turned to kiss her, out in public. Or the first time they met, just before the war, when someone from work brought her on a blind date, and he was knocked out by her sultry beauty, with a fresh flower pinned to her hair.

“What's she doing here?” Stephen said, when his father was resting in his room.

“She's come to stay.”

“
What?
For how long?”

“She's homeless, she doesn't have anywhere else to go.”

“Why does she have to stay with us?”

“Because we have a big house. We have more than enough room.”

“Ivan and Simone have a bigger house, let her stay there.”

“She barely knows Simone. It's not appropriate, and she doesn't have any real relationship with Ivan, as she does with me.”

“He said no, didn't he?”

“Well, yes, but…”

“She's not staying under my roof with my father here.”

“Your father is only with us for a week or two.”

“So? How long does she plan to stay?”

“I don't know.”

“Get rid of her, Andrea.”

“I can't and I won't. She's as much family to me as your father is. There are things I've never told you about Grace, because I knew you would be cross.”

“What things?”

“When her father died he left her some money. He had a flat in London and some art, that was what she got from him. She gave most of it away to her causes, but some she gave to Marianne, that was what she used to replace her camera when she was in Bosnia, a
lot of her equipment came from Grace. It's expensive and she was always able to keep up-to-date.”